Nexus One Phone Rides a Rocket Up 28,000 Feet

Google’s Nexus One phone is going where few smartphones have gone before. A group strapped the Nexus One to the back of a rocket and launched it from the Nevada desert high into the atmosphere to test the device’s performance up in the air.

The NexusOne PhoneSat project is comprised of a group of NASA Ames students, some Google employees, and two NASA contractors, all of whom donated their time to try and give a new meaning to the phrase “satellite phone.”

“The purpose of flying the Nexus One is to find a low-cost satellite solution,” says Thomas Atchison, chairman of the Mavericks Foundation. “The radio, processing power, sensors and cameras in smartphones potentially have the same capability as those in satellites.”

The idea is to drive down satellite cost by using off-the-shelf products and components, says Atchison.

“Today’s satellites are the size of Greyhound buses,” he says. “But I believe they are going to get smaller and more frequently deployed. This is a first-step effort.”

The Nexus One piggybacked on a rocket that was being launched alongside another one for a project called Clotho that’s trying to find out how far off the earth’s surface life exists.

The test flight with the Nexus One was to see how the device behaves under a high-G environment, says Atchison.

“If you put a Nexus One in orbit, how will it perform?” he says. “How does the device handle the thermal temperature and vibrations. We wanted to see the results.”

The resulting video from the Nexus One is below. As expected, the video is a lot of shaking, blue sky and blobs of light, but it is still fun to watch. An earlier test brought Nexus One back with a shattered screen, but the device did well on its second flight.

In the photo below, Mavericks researchers James Dougherty and Robert Briody show their rocket’s payload, including a biosampling module and the Google phone.

STORY UPDATED 8/2/2010: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed the Nexus One research project to the Mavericks Civilian Space Program. Mavericks provided the rocket, but not the payload. We have added a paragraph to correct the attribution.